"Networked classrooms" is an evocative term. For some people the term means building rooms that afford high fidelity video and audio connections from one space to another. For others, "networked classrooms" means a place where teachers and learners are "surfing" the net to find all sorts of pearls of wisdom. Still others view networked classrooms as the portal to vast arrays interpersonal interaction, like that which occurs in MUDs but in the service of teaching and learning . The networked classroom could be, and in all likelihood, will be all of these. The key question in this report is not which of these visions is "correct." Our key question is isolating the set research issues that will allow the networked classroom to flower into productive instantiations.
In this report we highlight research of issues that will shape and inform the development of the networked classrooms of the future. We believe that there are three critically important themes. First, the research community must recognize that classrooms are first and foremost social structures and that networked media will change the social structure of classrooms. Second, new networked media and the architectures that support them need to be informed by social structure and social goals. Third, both architecture and applications must have evaluative mechanisms that allow them to effectively evolve.
Social interaction, in the sense in which we mean it, encompasses most aspects of networked communication widely touted in the popular press and many others yet to conceived. Wide spread school networking will fundamentally reshape the way people engage in interpersonal communication for learning and not merely change the ways learners "get information" or surf the net. The challenging opportunity is to adopt the perspective that social interaction is the means to understand classrooms and classroom work. Therefore, even the simple "finding" of information can be viewed as the connection of students to distant communities and ways of knowing. Our goal here is to support learning as social interaction in all of its forms through a research agenda that will shape the creation of an enhanced network infrastructure. For example, while we want to support the expanded notion of a teacher as a mentor or guide, we must make a concerted effort to engineer learning spaces in ways that do not constrain developers and educators to any particular set of teaching and learning roles. This perspective is important because today and for the foreseeable future no single theoretical tradition has all the answers to building robust and effective learning environments.
The purpose of networks in classrooms is not to merely amplify what already exists. The key questions are not just how to make the same classroom activities occur faster, become cheaper, or take place over longer distances. Instead, networking offers the potential for the formation of new social structures and way of interactions in classrooms. The following scenario will illustrate some of the ways that networked classrooms might evolve.
A deep rumbling noise was heard, then wisps of smoke came from the rocky tip. With an abrupt roar the mountain blew its top throwing tons of ash into the air and shedding hot lava down its sides. Students sat rapt around the monitor watching Mt. St. Helens explode. "I heard an old man who wouldn't move was killed during this eruption." The voice came from another window on the monitor showing a group of students watching the same video but at another school. A student here responded, "Once the lava starts it goes too fast to outrun it." Mr. Rottenbury, the teacher, listened with interest to the conversation and then directed his attention to another group of students who were composing an email letter to their mentor at NASA, "OK, suppose we, like tell them, since the oceans came from volcano eruptions and Venus has as many volcanoes as the Earth does, why isn't Venus covered by water like most of the Earth?" "Remember to cc: me on any email that you send...", Mr. Rottenbury reminded the group as he continued walking around the class and reflected that posting that news message asking for suggestions on Internet resources on volcanoes had really paid off. He had received a number of responses giving addresses of web sites about volcanoes that had recently erupted, describing them through images, video, and data sets. Even better another teacher was starting a unit on volcanoes the same day -- it was her students that were jointly watching the St. Helens video with his students. One of the most intriguing resources to turn up was a volcano construction kit built around a MOO. His most adventuresome group of students were in the MOO now collaboratively building a new volcano complete with audio and visual sound effects for when it will blow. The group was still wrangling with other remote builders over what should happen when it blows and the effect it would have on anyone near-by when it happened. Everyone was in favor of some semi-permanent change to those visitors unlucky enough to be too virtually close, but the group couldn't agree on whether it should also undo the volcanoes those people had built. The debate was taking a long time because it involved students in several different time zones, so it had to be conducted asynchronously. After the bell sounded the flurry of activity diminished as the students drifted out after printing out copies of what they were working on, signed off their remote conversations, and finished the email messages they had been working on. The large smile that flashed across Mr. Rottenbury face as he congratulated himself on the excitement and involvement he had just witnessed was tempered as he reflected on the logs of computer activity, email messages, and catching up with mentors that remained to be done tonight. Perhaps that new program for automating analysis of student computer usage he had heard about coming from the NSF would save him some time, making classes like this more manageable.
Today's classrooms already orchestrate social interaction for learning. The networked classroom will be similar in kind but employing different means. To support this evolution, we see at least three types of research as critical:
Research efforts focused on these themes should coalesce to inform the development of architectures that will support applications that are deeply informed by the ways of learning and interpersonal communication.
Formation of groups
Patterns of interaction in groups
Broadly the elements to follow should coalesce for developers and users into specific applications that are tuned to the social and communicative needs of teaching and learning as carried out in a wide range of synchronous and asynchronous situations. Briefly, synchronous interactions are those where people, either co-located or separated, work together on common problems at the same time. Asynchronous applications are those where people work together on common problems at different times.
Some of the interpersonal primitive operations that will be necessary include the following:
An example of an application that could be built using these architectures is an electronic portfolio, where students store, review, and assess their own work in private space with invited reviews. Also included are public spaces to "publish" within and beyond the classroom allowing for peer review, teacher assessment or researcher evaluation.
To support the flexible and iterative redesign of applications based on these architectures new evaluation tools and methods are needed.
Understanding how educational goals are being achieved through computer and networked tools is critical for the evaluation of the tools. It is significant to note that the goals of different constituencies are markedly different. In addition most prototype educational technologies are moving targets. These difficulties can be addressed through different sets of analytic lenses to examine issues of design, the activities of students, and the comparison of learner outcomes for individuals and populations.
It is important that tools for assessment be built into the software that there are means for the different communities of interest to get the information they need in ways that are understandable. This suggests that in addition to building the data collection structure into the software, there also need to be tools for analysis and reporting of the log files that are generated. These tools need to be flexible enough so that the data can be viewed from all the relevant perspectives. Such an infrastructure should be more than simple event logs, since different audiences have different needs. For example, behavior traces are need that differentially track the use of teachers and students. Using these traces a teacher could build a useful profile of students' activity by compiling their contributions to priority-setting, brainstorming activities, or group work. Finally, any system of data storage would have several levels of progressive anonymity so that, at the broadest level of use, individual student, teacher and school identity is protected.